Erkin Koray, 1941-2023

On August 7, 2023, Erkin Koray passed away — one of the elder statesmen of Turkish music, widely regarded as the father of Anatolian rock (only Cem Karaca could have rivalled him for that title).

In particular, during the Seventies Koray released extremely innovative music that changed the face of the local scene. Yet what looks like a devastating loss for the local artistic community has stirred up contradictory reactions: notably, among the minorities living in Turkey, not everyone was moved by the news.

Alongside this article is a listening guide for anyone wishing to discover Koray's art, whose importance as a musician is beyond dispute. However, to give an accurate historical account, we cannot overlook the political impact Koray had, which raises some particularly controversial points.

Politics

In Turkey's 2007 general election, Koray declared his support for the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), a far-right party and the political reference point for the Grey Wolves, a movement that brings together Islamist extremism, racist propaganda, para-fascist methods of repression and, in its most extreme cases, resort to acts of terrorism.

Nor was this a mere lapse: in the past, he had voiced his admiration for Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, one of the leaders of the Grey Wolves. A well-known photo shows Koray and Yazıcıoğlu smiling and chatting in the latter's office.

Some point out that, following the criticism he received after that election, Koray's stance grew more moderate. First of all, by taking a position contrary to the MHP's on women wearing the veil, stating in his own words: "While Arabs are trying to free themselves from turbans and chadors, in Turkey we're doing the opposite. It's a very sad situation, and it makes you think."

Later he went even further, saying he had nothing more to say about the MHP and pointing to Atatürk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, as the example to follow: this statement, too, departs sharply from MHP policy, which has always been strongly opposed to the secularism of the state championed by Kemalism (the political current based on Atatürk's ideology, still today a pillar of the Republican People's Party, the main opposition force to Erdoğan).

These are statements that, however, were not enough to clear his name in the eyes of those belonging to ethnic minorities (Armenians, Kurds, Zaza) or religious ones (Alevis).

The impression is that Koray had always tried to soften the extremist side of the MHP and the Grey Wolves, playing down his past support for them or his admiration for their key figures, with populist-sounding statements such as: "I think it would be a great thing if the MHP and the İP (Workers' Party) were to unite." The now-defunct İP was a far-left, Maoist- and Kemalist-inspired party which, despite sharing some common ground with the MHP (from anti-Armenian sentiment to the Cyprus issue), could obviously never have merged with a party backed by a movement of fascist inspiration.

Furthermore, again following the 2007 election, he stated: "I'm neither right-wing nor left-wing." A claim that is hard to believe, given that he had voted for and backed the most right-wing party in the Turkish parliament.

Even the messages of condolence that arrived after his passing didn't help matters. While Erdoğan's can be justified by the fact that the Turkish president had to comment on the death of a figure so fundamental to his country's culture, that of Devlet Bahçeli, the current leader of the MHP, has instead led to suspicions that Koray's support for the party had remained active beneath the surface (it should be noted that this theory isn't backed by any journalistic evidence: it is, however, a sentiment that has emerged among Turkey's minorities who followed the news).

Copyright

Another controversial aspect of Erkin Koray's career, though one for which he probably bears little personal responsibility, concerns the handling of the copyrights to his songs. Koray was in fact not a particularly prolific composer: many of his tracks are reworkings, partly of Turkish songs, partly of pieces from the Arab world, including traditional ones, and more rarely of English-language songs.

Covers of contemporary Turkish authors are always duly credited to their respective writers, whereas for those coming from the Arab world, a questionable tendency has been noted to credit the songs to Koray himself.

What accounts for this? First of all, it should be made clear that the songs by Koray for which this tendency has been flagged date from between the Sixties and the Eighties.

That alone would go a long way toward explaining the phenomenon: one must picture the Middle Eastern music industry of the period in question. A chaotic scene in which copyright law was not yet clearly defined and which, particularly in Arab countries, involved a substantial number of counterfeit copies sold illegally, where it even happened that some record labels — sometimes operating on a strictly local scale, beyond the reach of the major companies — pressed editions of records to which they held no rights.

Moreover, often — at least as far as cassette tape editions were concerned — the songwriters weren't even credited at all. Try to imagine a Turkish musician of the time getting hold of a tape of Lebanese folk music in which none of the tracks bear any author's name. To obtain that information, he would have had to contact, from Turkey, the record label based in Lebanon, assuming that label had even printed its logo on the tape, and assuming that, once its name was known, it could actually be tracked down. And even if the label could be found, there was no guarantee its archives would reveal who had actually written the song.

As mentioned, copyright laws in third-world countries at the time were barely defined, and if their enforcement was already patchy at a local level, one can only imagine how unlikely their international application would have been (to grasp just how far behind part of the world still lags on this front, consider that, as of 2023, several Arab countries remain mere observers with regard to the TRIPS Agreement on intellectual property).

Living in today's interconnected world, we risk losing sight of just how difficult international communication used to be, especially without pre-existing connections, and with countries whose record industries were often not even required to keep properly organized archives (this too is an indisputable fact: just look at the disarray surrounding reissues in the Maghreb countries, often caused by the fact that even the labels themselves have no idea what the original material actually was).

Probably unable to determine who the songs actually belonged to, Koray credited himself as author on the grounds that the Turkish lyrics were his own creation. There were cases in which he tried to credit the original authors, but without success. For example, when he released "Öyle Bir Geçer" in 1983: the music for the song, which became one of his biggest hits, is in fact credited to Lata Mangeshkar, the legendary Indian singer. Unfortunately, however well-intentioned the artist and the record label were, the credit is wrong: the original song, "Kahan Se Yeh Sholon Ka Toofan Aaya", released in 1956 as part of the Bollywood film "Inspector", was indeed sung by Lata Mangeshkar, but set to music composed by Hemant Kumar — a detail that Koray and his entourage evidently failed to verify.

It's also worth remembering that, when it comes to claiming credit for compositions that weren't their own, illustrious international names like Led Zeppelin did far worse, and in a record market that was considerably more organized and easy to research: and yet no one questions their artistic stature.

One final note regarding copyright in Turkey: Mesam and Msg, the two collecting societies entrusted with protecting his work, were founded in 1986 and 1999 respectively. For material released after those dates, their archives appear to be consistent, but when it comes to music predating them, there is a clear lack of systematic oversight, with the result that the same song sometimes appears in both, credited differently, and even in cases where only one of the two societies would actually hold the rights to that specific piece (in Koray's case, Mesam's archive contains some of his songs even though he was never registered with it, being a member solely of Msg).

The Music

Having clarified all this, weighed the contradictions surrounding him, and drawn the necessary distinction between the man and the artist, Erkin Koray nonetheless remains an essential name in Turkish music. He was the first to record rock music in Turkish and is generally credited with having electrified the bağlama (perhaps the most widespread lute in Turkish folk music): if only for these two milestones, the local music scene cannot be understood without reckoning with his legacy.

His output is vast, and consequently not always worthy of his name, particularly from the Eighties onward. Examined below are three albums that offer a good sense of the weight of his work and the range of styles he tackled, at least as far as the brightest stretch of his career is concerned, namely the Seventies.

Arap Saçı (Pharaway Sounds, 2013)

Released by a Spanish label, this is the best collection of Erkin Koray's numerous singles issued outside the album format between 1967 and 1976: it brings together no fewer than twenty-four tracks, with practically all the classics present.

And so we get "Seni Her Gördüğümde" from 1969 (written for him by Yusuf Nalkesen, who had already penned songs for Zeki Müren, the most celebrated Turkish classical music singer of the twentieth century), "Fesuphanallah" from 1974 (a cover of "Weili Min Hobbon", released in 1971 by Lebanese mawwal singer Samir Yazbeck), "Şaşkın" from 1974 (a reworking of a traditional Iraqi song that Koray probably came to know through the celebrated version by Lebanese singer Samira Tawfik, performed in the style of Jordanian Bedouin folk under the title "Ya Ayn Mulayiitayn"), "Estarabim" and "Sevince" from 1975 (both self-penned), "Arap Saçı" from 1976 (written for him by Özer Şenay, an author who over the course of his career collaborated with some of the most popular Turkish singers, above all Ferdi Tayfur and Müslüm Gürses) and many other cornerstones.

Some tracks fall within the realm of anadolu rock (Anatolian rock), while others favour softer sonorities, closer to the so-called arabesque style (a genre of Turkish popular music influenced by folk melodies and Arabic classical music). Koray's creativity as an arranger shines through in his reworkings of other people's material, from which he often departs radically from the original versions.

Elektronik Türküler (Doğan, 1974)

Aside from a couple of compilations that haphazardly gathered together some of the singles already mentioned, this is Koray's first true album. It is considered one of the most important records in the history of Turkish music, and consists almost entirely of rock reworkings of Turkish folk classics (Koray himself wrote three tracks, which take up just 6 and a half of the album's 38 minutes).

It is one of the earliest classics of Anatolian rock on LP format, moving between hypnotic bass-and-drum rhythms, guitars distorted with a psychedelic edge, and melodies typical of local folk music, sometimes ancient ("Hele Yar", drawn from a poem by the celebrated seventeenth-century Anatolian bard Karacaoğlan), sometimes contemporary ("Türkü", a poem by the great writer and communist militant Nâzım Hikmet, set to music by Ruhi Su, a Turkish folk singer particularly active in the Seventies).

Nazilli, 1974 (bootleg)

Recorded by Nihat Örerel, the drummer who accompanied Koray at the time, at a cinema in Nazilli (in Aydın province) in 1974, this is a document of his live shows from that era. Whereas the studio Koray, even while using distorted guitars, worked with great precision and sought an absolutely clean sound, technical limitations of the era notwithstanding, on stage his approach was far more instinctive. The guitars come across as abrasive, the rhythm section noisy and relentless, and the vocals barely audible, likely due to the makeshift equipment used to capture the concert.

Every track, even those originally more faithful to conventional song structure, turns into a tumultuous, saturated jam, stretching out as far as the 25 minutes of "Mesafeler".

Sources: this article was written with the support of a Turkish citizen who preferred to remain anonymous. Koray's statements were gathered from dedicated articles by Turkey Posts, Ciddi Gazete and Bianet.

Lastly, readers are directed to the following article published on Oda Tv regarding the management of copyright in Turkey, with a specific focus on Koray's career.

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